How Do I Love Thee
by Googie
Summary: Written for Category A9 of the Castle Fan Awards: Castle & Beckett stuck in an empty room with a radio, a cat, a sharpie and a single cup of coffee.


_**I wrote this for the Castle Fan Awards, for Category A9: "Castle & Beckett stuck in an empty room with a radio, a cat, a sharpie and a single cup of coffee."**_

_**Disclaimer: I own nothing about Castle. The characters are the property of ABC.**_

The radio on her belt crackled to life with the report that all of the rooms on the floor were clear. She took it off her belt, and spoke into it, issuing a thanks to the uniform for his assistance, and letting him know that she and her partner would be up in a minute to check for any clues that may have been left behind.

"Castle, are you done with that thing yet?" Beckett asked in an exasperated tone as she looked at her partner. "Delaney said it's clear; we can go up now."

"It's _art_, Kate. Art takes time," he told her haughtily.

She rolled her eyes and started walking toward the stairs. It was quite a few flights, but there was no way she wanted to trust the elevator in this building. She was almost to the first landing when she heard Castle's footfalls behind her. She smiled to herself. She knew he'd follow. And now, it meant so much more than it ever had before.

At the third floor, she met Delaney and Smith as they were coming down. They had to report back to the station, and she gave them the go-ahead to leave. In their sweep of the eighth floor, they did see a few strange things left behind in one of the rooms, and advised her of where everything was so she and Castle could check it all out.

The break on the landing gave Castle a chance to catch up, but as soon as he met them, she started up again. He, of course, whined that he needed more of a break, but she just told him it was good exercise so he didn't get flabby. And when she stopped suddenly and turned around, telling him pointedly, "Climbing the stairs will build nice, _hard_ muscles. And I _really_ like nice, hard muscles, Rick," he gulped at her clear implication, then sprinted past her. She smiled and continued after him.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

The room that Delaney and Smith had found was indeed strange, although it did have a window. The door was a heavy, metal thing, propped open by a piece of wood under the knob. The room beyond the door looked like it was possibly an old storage area, but with metal walls. She walked inside, noting large sheets of paper tacked to the wall. Several feet wide, they must have been torn from an enormous roll. Most were blank, although some had paint on them, like they'd been used under some other media by someone who was doing some painting. After walking around the room and looking at the many papers, she concluded that while the room was odd, nothing in it was pertinent to their investigation. She also noticed that she hadn't heard any comments from Castle lately, which naturally piqued her curiosity.

And she rolled her eyes when she turned around and found that once again, he was drawing on his coffee cup.

"Castle, we're trying to investigate, here. Can you save your artistic endeavors for later when we're not working?"

His eyes snapped away from the cup to fix on her. "Later? You mean..." A cocky grin appeared on his face then. "You mean I could...maybe...draw all over _your_ body later?"

She glared at him. "No," she said bluntly. His face fell, and she couldn't resist messing with him a little more. "But maybe we could find something else to do," she said seductively. But then her tone changed to hard and business-like as she told him, "but now we have work to do." And she turned away from him to walk around the room.

He stared after her, letting his thoughts of sharpie-induced bliss evaporate like mist as he took in the odd room. But before he could process much about the room, he was jolted from his thoughts as he felt something rub against his leg as he heard a "M-roooow".

Then several things happened at once. Castle, thinking abandoned building=rat, immediately, as Esposito would say, 'screamed like a girl' as he jumped to the side quickly, trying to get away from the thing that had rubbed against his leg. Kate whipped her head around as she went for her gun.

And the animal that tried to nuzzle Castle was only a cat—not a big, hairy rat as he had instinctively thought—but his scream scared the poor animal. It jumped, and as it did, it dislodged the flimsy piece of wood under the knob of the door, and the door wasted no time in slamming shut.

The echo of the door slamming shut was almost deafening, but then the room settled down to silence as all that could be heard was Castle's ragged breathing. The two people looked at each other, somewhat stunned, and then their eyes traveled to the now-closed door. With a bad feeling, Beckett walked over to it and tugged on the handle, to find it...

Locked.

"M-roooow."

And then their eyes traveled to the other side of the room where the vocal cat sat, calmly washing its paws.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Two hours later, Beckett and Castle sat next to each other, leaning against the wall.

"It's too bad we don't have a bed in here," Castle mused with sideways leer in her direction. "We could put the time to good use."

She rolled her eyes. "Always the one track mind. Wasn't last night enough for you?" she asked teasingly.

"I was simply thinking of taking a nap," he said haughtily.

"Sure."

The cat evidently thought it was time to switch laps, because she got up from Beckett's lap and settled down on Castle's. As she primed her future slumber spot with her paws, Castle got a pained look on his face. Kate looked down to where the cat was pushing her paws and tried to stifle a smile. "Too much coffee, Castle?"

"If we have to be stuck in a room, why can't it have a bathroom?"

"Why does it have to have metal walls that interfere with the radio reception?" she countered. "And you know, you should have left the cup in the car. Then you wouldn't have finished the coffee while you were drawing on the stupid cup."

"But then," he said, proudly holding up the now-empty cup for their perusal, "I wouldn't have been able to create this masterpiece!"

She rolled her eyes again. "Castle, you don't _need_ to win a contest for decorating a coffee cup. You write books. You're even moderately successful..."

"Moderately?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.

She ignored him. "How many coffee cups have you decorated with that stupid sharpie this week? Is it out of ink yet?"

"It _does_ still have ink, and each drawing keeps getting better."

"Castle, it's a gimmick to get you to buy more coffee. You have to buy the largest size and decorate the empty cup in order to enter the contest? Come on."

"Hey, we drink coffee anyway. And the fun is in the trying, in the creation. In using your imagination to see if you can come up with something new or unusual. You have to stick with it, not give up, and just maybe something wonderful will come out of it."

He looked at her pointedly, and she got the feeling that, once again, they were talking about more than just coffee cups.

But yeah, they read each other so well, even better now. So she leaned over and gave him a kiss as she placed her hand on the soft fur of the cat that was lying down on his lap. "Yes, Rick, _we_ can stick with it. We've been doing pretty well the last couple of months, haven't we? And I figure we'd better stick with it, because I'm not done having my wicked way with you whenever I want to." That comment earned her a befuddled deer-in-the-headlights look. "What's wrong, Rick?" She knew full well what was the cause of his wide-eyed stare, but she couldn't resist asking him.

"You just don't usually talk like..._that _during working hours. Or let _me_ say things like that," he pouted.

"Yeah, well...nobody else is here right now. I don't think the cat's talking. I'm just surprised we've been able to keep things from Ryan and Esposito as long as we have," she mused.

"Especially when we barely spend a night apart anymore. So _when_ are you going to move in with me again? Then you can keep having your wicked way with me, whenever you want," he promised, grinning at her.

"Nice try, big guy," she told him, referring to yet another attempt by him to get her to agree to making their cohabitation status official. It had only been a couple of months. That was way too soon to move in together. Wasn't it?

But she didn't want to think about that yet again, when the topic already plagued her mind as it was. So her mind grabbed the last topic they'd been discussing. "But as for your coffee cup, and this little art contest, I think you'd better retire your sharpie and or find a new use for it, okay?"

As she absently petted the cat, it started purring again. Castle started rubbing the other side of the cat's head, and its eyes closed in bliss at the attention from the two adults. "She's certainly an affectionate thing, isn't she? I wonder where she came from. She doesn't seem like a wild, feral street cat."

"Pets get abandoned. It's sad, but it happens."

Just then, the cat decided that it was time for a body switch; she ambled off of Rick's lap and back onto Kate's, nudging Kate's hand with her head, asking for more attention. "She's not very subtle, is she?" Kate laughed.

"I would say she just has really good taste." And then she watched as he got a gleam in his eye and a grin on his face. And he leaned over to give her a quick kiss before standing up.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm doing what you told me to do. Finding a new use for my sharpie." And then he uncapped the sharpie and started writing on one of the large sheets of paper on the wall behind where they were sitting.

She hugged the cat to her as she leaned out to try to get a look, but he reached down and gently pushed her back against the wall before she could see anything. "Not yet. Not while I'm creating. You can read it when I'm done."

The next fifteen minutes were filled with almost nothing but the soft sounds of the cat purring and the sharpie swiftly skimming across the paper on the walls. His expressions were comical; sometimes he would smile, sometimes he would furrow his brows. Sometimes he would stop everything and glance down at her, smile, and then go back to writing on the wall, as if he was just checking to make sure that she was still there.

Finally, twenty minutes later, when the cat was fast asleep in her lap and he was standing there, arms crossed and brows furrowed again as he just stared at his unknown creation, she held the cat close to her as she got up.

Her movement was enough to make his eyes flit over to her. "What are you doing?"

"I just need to stand up. That floor isn't exactly conducive to sitting for a long time."

"But..." he protested, "uh...just don't turn around, okay? It's not finished yet."

"_What_ isn't finished yet?"

"Just...my latest sharpie project. You told me to do something else, so I'm...uh...I did something for you. But I can't get the last line right."

"Rick..." She couldn't think of what he might have written for her. Well, at least he wasn't drawing any more pictures, which was a good thing, judging from the multitude of coffee-cup creations that she'd seen. "I don't know what the big deal is. I've read a lot of things that you've written. Probably pretty much everything."

"But this is...different." Whereas before he'd looked so confident and almost excited about what he was doing, now he just looked hesitant. Almost worried.

"Oh, for goodness sakes," she told him as she turned around to read the wall. "How can it be so different that..."

But she never finished her question, as her eyes caught the first few lines of his composition. She clutched the boneless cat just a little tighter as her mouth dropped open in surprise. And as she read more of what he wrote, she only closed her mouth to swallow, trying to hold in the flood of emotion that went through her when she read his words.

_"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways._

_I love you in the precinct, the car, in my bed,_

_wherever we may be, wherever, by you, I am led._

_I love you sitting at your desk, eating a burger, _

_just waking up, and smiling, or solving a tough murder._

_I love you totally, neverending, for all of my days_

_I love you gratefully, that you gave us a chance._

_I will never forget the rain-soaked you, showing up_

_at my door, to tell me that you wanted me._

_I loved you before, I loved you then. And now,_

_I love you even more, for you have my heart, _

_completely, totally, without reservation. It is now yours, all yours._

_So someday, my true love, I hope you will agree_

_That you will come, to my home, and live with me._

He wrote her a sonnet?

That was so...Castle. And...romantic.

In the last few months, since she almost died without him, she had finally, _finally_ seen what mattered most, had finally seen all that she could have with him. She didn't regret it, not at all.

But sometimes, it all just hit her, and at those times she felt like she was becoming a sappy romantic. But when she looked into those laughing blue eyes, saw the grin that was just for her, or still felt the pull in her belly that accompanied the gentle brush of his lips against hers, she didn't care if she was a sappy romantic. She wouldn't trade it, not for anything.

"You wrote me a sonnet," she told him softly, finally looking at him, her eyes just a little misty.

"No, not exactly," he explained. "I kind of put my own spin on it. The lines have ten words, not syllables. And the last line just has too many of everything. It's not right. It's actually pretty bad." He still sounded kind of nervous.

Still holding the cat with one arm, she stepped close to him and put her other hand around his neck and drew his head close to her. "It's perfect," she told him, leaning her forehead against his.

"Really?" he asked, hopefulness in his voice.

"Really." And then she punctuated her statement by pulling his lips to hers, somehow taking care not to smoosh the cat between them.

They lost themselves in their kiss, so much so that they never heard the footsteps on the other side of the door, nor did they hear the door opening. And they never registered the presence of Detectives Ryan or Esposito until, after the two detectives looked at each other with wide eyes and slack jaws, Ryan finally cleared his throat.

The other detective and the author slowly broke apart, and when they registered the presence of the others in the room, their eyes became saucers too.

"Anything you two want to share with the class?" Esposito asked. "Although I have to say you two finally doing something about this...thing...between you? It's about damn time."

"Uh..." Ryan interrupted. "It looks like we're a little late to the show. Looks like they've been doing something about their 'thing' for a while now," he said, gesturing to the wall and the Castle-sonnet. Esposito's eyes followed Ryan's gesture, and his eyes got big again as he read the giant love note.

"Whoa," was all Esposito said.

"M-roooow."

All eyes whipped back to the cat in Beckett's arms, now awake and looking around at the newcomers sleepily. "Where'd you get the cat?" Esposito asked.

"She locked us in here," Castle told them. "Uh, look...guys, about that note, it's...uh..."

"Oh, it's obvious what it is, Castle," Ryan said with a smirk. "But I just have one question." He turned to Beckett. "So, Beckett...exactly when are you going to put the poor guy out of his misery and move in with him?"

Beckett looked from the purring cat in her arms, to Castle's worried face, to the smirks on the faces of Ryan and Esposito, and finally over to the Castle-love-sonnet that he'd penned just for her. And she knew, as sure as she knew her own name, that there was only one answer she could give. She pursed her lips together to keep from grinning, and then to the shock of everyone in the room, she said sassily, "Well, Ryan, it looks like Castle and I have a cat now, and we can't have her going between two homes...so since you seem to be so keen on me moving in with Castle, you two can just plan on helping me move this weekend."

And she walked to the door, only turning around when she'd reached the now-open doorway. She wished she could have had a picture of the shock on the faces of the three men staring at her. "Are you guys going to stand there all day? Come on, let's go. And Castle, don't forget that sonnet. We're framing that to hang in our bedroom."

_**Thanks very much for reading! **_


End file.
